- 3 days ago
Oman has long been recognized as one of the most stable, diplomatic, and peace-oriented countries in the Middle East. For decades, the Sultanate has positioned itself as a mediator rather than a provocateur, a bridge rather than a battlefield, and a quiet stabilizer in a region often defined by rivalry and conflict. Yet despite this reputation, a growing number of American policymakers, commentators, and strategic analysts have begun to question Oman’s place in Washington’s regional calculations. The phrase “why America is turning against peaceful Oman” reflects a concern that is not necessarily about hostility toward the Omani people, but about changing U.S. perceptions shaped by geopolitics, security strategy, energy transitions, and regional alliances.
This shift does not mean that the United States has abandoned Oman as a partner. Rather, it suggests that the tone of the relationship has become more complicated. In Washington, foreign policy is increasingly driven by competition, hard security demands, and pressure from allies with conflicting priorities. Oman’s longstanding neutrality, its independent diplomacy, and its refusal to align itself aggressively with any camp have sometimes been interpreted not as wisdom, but as hesitation or even strategic ambiguity. That misunderstanding is central to the current debate.
To understand this evolving dynamic, it is necessary to examine the deeper reasons behind America’s changing view. These include the U.S. focus on maritime security in the Gulf, concerns about Oman’s role as a mediator with Iran, questions about regional defense coordination, and the broader American effort to restructure its Middle East commitments. Oman remains peaceful, but peace in itself is not always enough to satisfy an increasingly transactional foreign policy environment.
This shift does not mean that the United States has abandoned Oman as a partner. Rather, it suggests that the tone of the relationship has become more complicated. In Washington, foreign policy is increasingly driven by competition, hard security demands, and pressure from allies with conflicting priorities. Oman’s longstanding neutrality, its independent diplomacy, and its refusal to align itself aggressively with any camp have sometimes been interpreted not as wisdom, but as hesitation or even strategic ambiguity. That misunderstanding is central to the current debate.
To understand this evolving dynamic, it is necessary to examine the deeper reasons behind America’s changing view. These include the U.S. focus on maritime security in the Gulf, concerns about Oman’s role as a mediator with Iran, questions about regional defense coordination, and the broader American effort to restructure its Middle East commitments. Oman remains peaceful, but peace in itself is not always enough to satisfy an increasingly transactional foreign policy environment.
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00:03The President of the United States just threatened to bomb Oman, a country that spent 50 years
00:08quietly negotiating American hostages out of Iran, brokering secret nuclear deals, and
00:13keeping the Strait of Hormuz open for everyone. What happened between Washington and its most
00:17loyal Arab ally is the story nobody is explaining properly. Let's break it down.
00:23We'll have to blow them up. There is a small country on the edge of the Arabian Peninsula
00:28that almost nobody outside the region thinks about, and that, for the better part of two
00:31centuries, has quietly made itself indispensable to the United States without ever once raising
00:36its voice. It has hosted secret meetings that changed history. It has bought the freedom of
00:40Americans held hostage in Iran, using its own royal treasury. It has stood at the mouth of one of the
00:45most valuable strips of water on earth and told everyone, for decades, the same simple thing,
00:50talk to me and I will talk to everyone. That country is Oman. And in the summer of 2026,
00:55the President of the United States stood in front of cameras in the White House and threatened,
00:59in plain language, to bomb it. Let's start with exactly what happened, because on its own,
01:03stripped of any context, this moment is almost impossible to believe.
01:07In late February 2026, the fragile peace that Oman had spent years quietly nursing along collapsed.
01:12On 27 February, Omani Foreign Minister Saeed Badr al-Busetti had just met U.S. Vice President
01:18J.D. Vance in Washington, describing what he called creative and constructive ideas and proposals
01:23that had produced unprecedented progress toward a nuclear deal with Iran.
01:27Hours later, President Trump announced joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran,
01:31saying he believed Tehran would strike first and that negotiations had stalled.
01:34Al-Busetti pushed back hard, insisting significant progress had genuinely been made. It didn't matter,
01:40the war had begun. Here's Oman's foreign minister himself, in an interview recorded just before that
01:45breaking point, laying out exactly how close he believed the two sides had come.
01:49I am confident, and in my assessment of the way the talks are going,
01:56I think there is really, I can see that the peace deal is within our reach.
02:03That was Oman's role, right up until the moment the missiles started flying. The mediator in the
02:07room insisting a deal was almost done. Once the war began, Oman didn't get to stay on the sidelines
02:12for long either. Iranian drones struck the Omani commercial port of Dukkham on 1 March 2026,
02:17injuring a worker, and again on 3 March, hitting a fuel storage tank. Attacks later confirmed in
02:22contemporaneous Reuters reporting and documented in a broader timeline of Iranian strikes on Omani
02:27territory. At the time, Trump publicly expressed solidarity, saying Iran was hitting countries
02:32that had nothing to do with what is going on. Oman was a victim of this war before it was
02:36ever
02:36accused of aiding the other side. Then came the Strait of Hormuz problem. Once fighting broke out,
02:42Iran effectively disrupted transit through the strait and asserted control through a body U.S.
02:46Treasury officials later sanctioned, referred to in reporting as the Persian Gulf Strait
02:51Authority. Reports began circulating that Iran and Oman were in discussions about future management
02:56of the waterway, potentially including fees tied to environmental remediation, safety,
03:00or navigation services, which Iranian officials insisted were consistent with coastal state
03:05rights under international maritime law, not discriminatory tolls. The International Maritime
03:10Organization stated flatly, there is no legal basis for any country to impose tolls or discriminatory
03:16conditions on passage through an international strait. Iran, at points, reportedly charged
03:20as much as $2 million per ship regardless. A U.S. intelligence assessment went further,
03:25concluding that Oman itself was planning to join Iran in tolling vessels passing through the strait.
03:30Oman denied it immediately and repeatedly. Omani officials, including the country's ambassador
03:35in Washington, personally assured U.S. counterparts, including Treasury Secretary Scott Besant,
03:40that Muscat opposed tolls and supported freedom of navigation. But the damage to trust was already
03:46spreading. According to U.S. and Arab officials cited by the Wall Street Journal on 1 June 2026,
03:51Washington had come to see Oman's continued engagement with Tehran as hostile to American
03:56interests, and was actively pressing Muscat to pick a side and sever diplomatic ties with Iran.
04:01Sanctions were threatened, so was military action. And then on 27 May 2026, during a cabinet meeting at the
04:07White House, a reporter asked President Trump whether he'd accept a short-term arrangement
04:11letting Iran and Oman jointly oversee the strait. Watch what happened.
04:15Now, the strait's going to be open to everybody. It's, uh...
04:18And who would control it?
04:19It's international waters.
04:20A reasonable-sounding start. A promise about open water, open trade,
04:24nothing controlled by any one nation. But he wasn't finished.
04:28Nobody's going to control it. We're going to watch over it. We'll watch over it. But nobody's
04:31going to control it. That's part of the negotiation that we have.
04:34Notice the shift there from nobody controls it to we're going to watch over it. That's the tell.
04:39Because in the very next breath, still answering the exact same question,
04:42still talking about the exact same ally, Trump named names.
04:46If they would like to control it, nobody's going to control it. It's international waters and
04:50Oman will behave just like everybody else who will have to blow them up.
04:54Read that sentence again. Not Iran. Oman. A country with no forces occupying anyone's territory.
05:00A country whose ports had already been bombed by the other side in this war.
05:03A country that had spent 200 years proving its loyalty to Washington.
05:07And the President of the United States had just threatened,
05:09on camera, in front of the world's press, to blow it up.
05:12They understand that. They'll be fine.
05:14There was brief, genuine confusion in the days that followed over whether Trump had simply
05:17misspoken, whether he meant to say Iran, and said Oman by mistake. He hadn't.
05:21The State Department later shared a transcript on social media confirming the reference to Oman was
05:26intentional. Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baggi publicly expressed solidarity with Oman the
05:31very next day. A striking image. Tehran defending Muscat from an American president.
05:36Human rights advocate Reed Jarrah of the group Don said the language sounded like a mafia boss,
05:40and argued it violated the UN Charter's prohibition on threatening force against another state.
05:45Samir Puri of King's College London called the threat,
05:47really surprising, warning it would send, shockwaves across the region,
05:51while doing little to actually change Iran's position on the strait.
05:54Treasury Secretary Scott Besant piled on, warning the US would aggressively target anyone facilitating
05:59Iranian tolls, Oman included. Secretary of State Marco Rubio went further still,
06:04remarking that there isn't a country on earth other than Iran, and maybe Oman that flirted with
06:08it, who's in favor of what Iran is doing in the straits. Oman's response when it finally came
06:13from its information ministry, was almost eerily calm, declining to directly address the pressure
06:17to sever Iran ties, but stating that Oman stands ready to work with the United States and
06:22all responsible partners to promote stability, deter disruption, and safeguard our shared
06:26strategic interests. Translation, we're not choosing a side, we never have, and it kept
06:31talking to Tehran anyway. Legal experts were quick to point out the irony buried inside Trump's own
06:36words. Most of the strait of Hormuz doesn't actually sit in international waters at all.
06:40It lies within Iranian and Omani territorial waters, governed by the transit passage rules of
06:45the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, not the open ocean freedoms Trump was describing.
06:50Muhannad Selim of the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, summed up the real anxiety driving the
06:55threat. What Washington wants to prevent is the normalization of Iranian control over Hormuz,
07:00dressed in administrative and legal clothing, and given Arab cover by a U.S. ally. Threatening a
07:05small ally is also a message to the whole Gulf, do not give Iran cover. Trump's threat didn't stand
07:10alone, either it sat inside a broader pattern of pressure Washington was applying across the whole
07:15Gulf that same month, though none of it as blunt as what Oman received. Trump was publicly linking any
07:19broader end-of-war deal to expanding the Abraham Accords, pushing Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar
07:25to normalize relations with Israel, at one point saying flatly that those countries owe it to us.
07:30Saudi Arabia in particular faced direct linkage. A civilian nuclear cooperation deal reportedly made
07:36contingent on Riyadh joining the Accords, but notably, none of Washington's other Gulf partners
07:40were threatened with bombing. Oman was in a category of its own. The reaction inside Washington's own
07:45foreign policy circles was just as sharp. On Democracy Now!, Robert Malley, a former senior
07:51Middle East official under three presidents, didn't hold back when asked about the moment.
07:55It's because of his unlawful, unnecessary war that the Strait of Hormuz is closed.
07:59A sitting U.S. president had just threatened to bomb one of the country's oldest, quietest,
08:03most loyal allies over a waterway that was only in dispute because of a war Washington itself had
08:08started weeks earlier. Oman hadn't changed. It was doing exactly what it had always done,
08:12talking to everyone, aligned with no one trying to keep the water open. What had changed was the
08:16war around it, and suddenly, that old formula wasn't good enough anymore. So what happens to
08:21a 50-year friendship when the smaller partner simply refuses to flinch? That's where the story
08:25goes next. The Switzerland of Arabia
08:29So who exactly did the president of the United States just threaten to bomb? Not a rogue state,
08:34not an adversary. To understand how strange that moment really was, you have to understand what
08:38Oman has spent 50 years building. Oman is not a place that picks fights. It is not a place that
08:42picks sides. Analysts and diplomats have a nickname for it, one that keeps surfacing in article after
08:46article. The Switzerland of the Middle East, or sometimes the Switzerland of Arabia. It is a
08:51country that has built its entire foreign policy, its entire identity, around a doctrine called
08:56positive neutrality. The idea that a small state survives not by choosing an ally and hiding behind
09:01them, but by staying close enough to everyone that no one can afford to make it an enemy. This doctrine
09:06did not appear out of nowhere. It was shaped deliberately, starting in 1970, under a ruler named
09:11Sultan Qabuz bin Said, and it has been carried forward since 2020 by his successor, Sultan
09:15Hatham bin Tariq. During the brutal, grinding Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, while nearly every
09:20other Gulf monarchy tilted hard toward Baghdad, Oman did something almost nobody else in the
09:24region was willing to do. It kept talking to Tehran too. It quietly hosted secret ceasefire
09:29discussions between the two warring nations in Muscat. Nothing was signed, no treaty emerged,
09:33but something more valuable was built, trust. The kind of trust that doesn't show up in a headline,
09:37but that becomes priceless 20, 30, 40 years later, when a great power desperately needs
09:42someone the other side will still pick up the phone for. And that is exactly what happened.
09:46Fast forward to the early 2010s. The United States and Iran had not spoken meaningfully
09:51in decades. Diplomatically, publicly, politically, talking to Tehran was radioactive in Washington,
09:55and talking to Washington was radioactive in Tehran. So in 2012 and 2013, it was Oman,
10:01and only Oman, that quietly arranged the very first secret, direct meetings between American
10:05and Iranian officials in Muscat. Those hidden conversations became the scaffolding for the
10:10historic 2015 nuclear agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. Diplomats
10:15and analysts would later give Oman a title for this, the unsung hero of the Iran nuclear deal.
10:21Nobody outside the room knew Oman had made it possible. That was the entire point.
10:25Oman's quiet diplomacy was never limited to nuclear politics either. Between 2009 and 2011,
10:31Omani mediators worked for two full years to secure the release of three American hikers detained
10:35in Iran, Sarah Showard, Shane Bauer, and Joshua Faddle, with Sultan Qaboos himself reportedly
10:40posting a bond of roughly half a million dollars out of his own pocket to bring Showard home in
10:45September 2010. Reporting compiled by TRT World Claims Oman has helped secure the release or safe
10:50evacuation of at least 14 living Americans held in the region, plus the remains of at least one more,
10:56across the decades, though, as with any tally of quiet diplomatic favors performed off the record,
11:00Precise numbers vary by source. Then there's the military side of the relationship, which is just
11:05as old and just as deep. In 1833, Oman signed a Treaty of Amity and Commerce with the United States,
11:12the very first formal agreement Washington ever made with an Arab Gulf state. In 1980, Oman became
11:17the first Gulf country to grant the US military access to its ports and airfields, a level of
11:22cooperation that has quietly supported nearly every major American military operation in the region
11:27since, the Iran-Iraq war logistics, the 1991 Gulf War, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and ongoing
11:33maritime security patrols. A free trade agreement followed in 2006. And Oman's deepwater port at
11:39Dukkham, large enough to service aircraft carriers, remains one of the most strategically valuable pieces
11:44of coastline in the entire Gulf. Oman's mediator instincts stretched into nearly every regional
11:49crisis you can name. When the Saudilid coalition went to war in Yemen in 2015, Oman was the only Gulf
11:54Cooperation Council member that refused to join militarily, instead hosting Houthi representatives
11:59in Muscat, while simultaneously keeping open channels with the Yemeni government, Saudi Arabia,
12:04the UAE, and Western diplomats. That balancing act helped produce the UN-backed truce of April 2022,
12:10and it later positioned Oman as a discrete go-between, as the United States tried to
12:14de-escalate Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping. And in 2021 and 2022, working quietly alongside Iraq,
12:21Oman helped lay the groundwork for one of the biggest diplomatic surprises of the decade,
12:25the March 2023 restoration of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran,
12:30two bitter regional rivals who hadn't spoken in years. None of this made headlines in the moment,
12:35and that was by design. Academic researchers who study Omani foreign policy, like James Worrell,
12:40who literally titled his analysis Switzerland of Arabia, describe Oman as something closer to an
12:44interlocutor state, a country whose entire strategic value comes from its willingness to talk to people
12:49other states refuse to. Its strength was never armies or oil wealth on the scale of its neighbors.
12:54Its strength was trust, patiently built over half a century, one quiet phone call at a time.
12:59The Stimson Center's analysis of Oman's tension reduction diplomacy and separate research from
13:03the Middle East Council on Global Affairs both arrive at the same basic conclusion from different
13:08angles. Oman's mediation record is not a string of lucky coincidences. It is a repeatable,
13:13deliberate methodology. Confidentiality first, talks happen in Muscat precisely because nothing leaks.
13:18Consensus second, Oman almost never tries to impose an outcome, only to create the conditions where
13:23an outcome becomes possible. And consistency third, which might be the rarest ingredient of
13:27all in Middle Eastern diplomacy. The same patient, low ego approach, decade after decade, regardless of
13:33who occupies the White House or who sits on Iran's Supreme National Security Council. That consistency
13:38is exactly why Tehran has continued to treat Muscat as a reliable Arab interlocutor, even when every
13:44other Gulf capital views Iran with open hostility. It's also worth pausing on just how unusual Oman's
13:50restraint really is, given what it risks by maintaining it. Its economy is nowhere near as
13:54large as Saudi Arabia's or the UAE's. It has no equivalent of Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth fund,
13:59no equivalent of Riyadh's oil reserves, and no serious independent military deterrent against a
14:04larger regional power. Everything Oman has ever gained from mediation, it gained through discretion
14:09instead of leverage, which means the entire strategy is built on a fragile currency. The belief, held
14:14simultaneously in Washington and Tehran, that Oman will keep its word to both of them at once. Break that
14:19belief on either side, and the currency becomes worthless overnight. Which brings us to the geography
14:24that makes all of this matter so much right now. Oman doesn't just border Iran diplomatically, it borders
14:29Iran physically, sharing the narrow, crowded waterway known as the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint through
14:34which roughly a fifth of the entire world's oil supply passes every single day. For decades,
14:39that shared geography turned into shared responsibility. Oman and Iran cooperated on
14:44navigation guidance, search and rescue operations, and maritime safety in waters that belong in part
14:49to both of them. It was never a threat to American interests. It was, if anything, one of the reasons
14:54the
14:54Strait stayed open and calm for so long. So by the early months of 2026, Oman looked on paper,
14:59exactly like what it had always been. America's oldest, quietest, most reliable golf partner.
15:04A country that had spent 200 years proving its loyalty not through public displays of allegiance,
15:09but through decades of unglamorous background channel usefulness that Washington relied on
15:13again and again, especially when it came to Iran. Nobody was worried about Oman. There was no reason to
15:18be. That's the 50 years of trust that was sitting behind the threat you just heard. The reputation,
15:22the history, the goodwill that Trump's cabinet table remark put on the line in a single sentence.
15:27Which raises the obvious question, was it worth it? What did threatening a 200-year ally actually
15:31accomplish? For Washington, for the region, and for Oman itself, that's where we go next.
15:37The Price of Standing Still
15:39Here's the strange part of this entire story. Oman did not change. Not its policy, not its posture,
15:45not its message. Everyone around Oman changed instead, and that, according to a growing chorus
15:49of foreign policy analysts, is precisely the problem. Adele Abdul-Gafar of the Australian Strategic
15:54Policy Institute, put it about as bluntly as a foreign policy analyst can. In a piece published
15:59just two weeks after Trump's threat, titled, How to Lose Friends and Alienate Allies, he called
16:04Washington's approach to Oman, strategically self-defeating. His argument was simple.
16:08Oman's neutrality isn't opportunism. It's not fence-sitting. It's a deliberate 50-year
16:13doctrine rooted in geography and history, and the United States has directly benefited from that
16:17neutrality for nearly 200 years. No other Gulf state, he argued, can replace Oman as a trusted line
16:23into Tehran. Public threats don't make that channel more useful. They destroy the credibility
16:27that made it valuable in the first place. And allies watching from the Indo-Pacific to Europe,
16:31he warned, are taking notes on how Washington treats a partner of almost two centuries when
16:36that partner declines to fall in line. The New York Times picked up a similar thread on 10 June
16:402026, in a piece by Vivian Nehrime carrying the headline, How Quiet Oman Landed Itself in Trump's
16:46Cross Hairs. The article quoted Omani academic Abdullah Babud, who captured the entire dilemma in a single line,
16:51Sometimes standing in the middle is not easy. For Washington, it is almost that you are either
16:55with us or against us, and Oman doesn't want to do that. That's really the whole story in one
17:00sentence. Oman's superpower, talking to everybody, only works in a world where at least some room
17:04for middle ground still exists. Wartime binary logic doesn't leave room for a middle. And Oman
17:09didn't blink. Reporting through late June and early July described Oman delivering a formal proposal
17:14to the United States and Western allies, outlining a framework where shipping companies would pay
17:18Iran and Oman for specific services in the strait, still framed by Muscat as voluntary fees, fully
17:23compliant with international law, still flatly rejected by Washington as unacceptable. Oman's
17:29government reiterated that any future management regime would involve consultation with the
17:33International Maritime Organization and comply with international law, and continued its bilateral
17:38talks with Tehran on navigation management well into July 2026, even after being threatened with bombs.
17:44Oman's willingness to speak plainly about the war itself hadn't helped its standing either.
17:49Months earlier, in March 2026, Foreign Minister Al-Busetti wrote a strikingly candid piece for
17:54The Economist, accusing the United States of having lost control of its own foreign policy,
17:59under Israeli influence, and describing the US and Israeli attacks on Iran as illegal under
18:03international law, while also calling Iranian retaliation against Gulf states deeply regrettable
18:08and completely unacceptable. Yet adding it was probably the only rational option available to the
18:13Iranian leadership. That single sentence, more than almost anything else, is what made some of
18:18Oman's own Gulf neighbors deeply uneasy. Because here's the part of this story that rarely makes
18:23the headlines. It wasn't just Washington growing frustrated with Oman, it was the rest of the Gulf too.
18:28While Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar issued strong condemnations of Iranian
18:33strikes on their territory, Oman conspicuously did not join them in the same language. At a Gulf
18:38cooperation council meeting in Riyadh in early March, the bloc declared that the security of member
18:42states was indivisible, an attack on one being an attack on all. Oman sent a representative to
18:47that meeting, but was the only member absent from a follow-up session focused on a more unified
18:51assertive response. By late April, when Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman hosted a GCC leaders
18:57meeting in Jeddah specifically about the war, Oman sent no one at all. None of this was accidental,
19:01and none of it stemmed from confusion. Oman is the only GCC member whose leadership follows
19:06Ibadi Islam rather than the Sunni tradition shared by its neighbors. One small piece of a broader,
19:11distinct worldview that has quietly shaped a different set of instincts for decades.
19:15But even as the Gulf's collective patience with Muscat thinned, the underlying goal barely
19:19differed at all. Every GCC state, Oman included, wanted this war to end through negotiation rather
19:24than escalation. Several Gulf capitals had privately urged Washington against striking Iran in the first
19:29place. The difference wasn't the destination Oman was aiming for, it was Oman's stubborn refusal to
19:34stop talking to Tehran on the way there, wartime optics be damned. This same instinct, engagement
19:38without commitment, showed up again in an entirely different arena. Back on 19 February 2026, Oman had
19:45chosen to attend the very first meeting of the US-led Board of Peace, a Trump administration
19:49initiative on Gaza reconstruction, strictly as an observer, not a full member. Researcher Sumia Al-Waheibai
19:55of the Observer Research Foundation, described this as a textbook expression of positive neutrality,
20:00staying in the room, gathering information, preserving relationships, without binding Muscat
20:04to an initiative operating largely outside the UN framework, which prioritized reconstruction funding
20:10ahead of any real political roadmap to Palestinian statehood. When the broader US-Iran war erupted just
20:15nine days later, Oman's decision to hold back looked less like hesitation and more like foresight.
20:20Indonesia, notably, had committed a thousand troops to the same initiative, then froze its involvement
20:25within weeks, threatening withdrawal if the board stopped serving Palestinian interests. So where
20:30does that leave Oman today? Bruised but unmoved. Its ports have been struck by the very neighbor it
20:34insists on continuing to talk to. Its oldest ally has publicly threatened to bomb it. Its closest
20:39regional partners have grown visibly, quietly frustrated with it. And through all of it, Oman has
20:44done exactly what it has always done for 50 straight years. Kept both lines open. Refused every binary
20:49choice on offer. And bet, the same way it bet during the Iran-Iraq war. The same way it bet
20:53building the
20:53JCPOA backchannel. The same way it bet hosting Houthi negotiators nobody else would touch. That
20:58the world eventually needs a country willing to talk to everyone far more than it needs one more
21:03ally willing to shout. Even ordinary people across the region were watching this unfold in real time,
21:08and forming their own opinions about it. In one modest online discussion in early June 2026,
21:13in a small community dedicated to Oman, a user shared a video breaking down exactly why Washington had
21:18turned on its quietest ally. And the replies underneath it captured, in miniature, the same tension playing
21:23out at the level of governments. Some commenters dismissed the entire American posture with open
21:28contempt, describing a broader regional drift toward partners other than the United States.
21:33Others were far more clear-eyed about the physics of the situation. Oman, one commenter put it,
21:37was genuinely, in a bit of a pickle, surrounded by neighbors who would react badly to any joint
21:42tolling arrangement with Iran, facing an American government with real tools of sanctions and
21:46pressure at its disposal. And likely to end up bending, at least partially, simply because it lacked the
21:51leverage not to. That is, in essence, exactly what happened over the following weeks. Public denial,
21:56continued talks, incremental accommodation, and no formal break with Tehran. The uncomfortable
22:01question this whole saga leaves behind isn't really about Oman at all. It's about what kind of partner
22:06Washington wants in a crisis. A country loud enough to declare loyalty on command, or a quiet one that
22:11spent 200 years proving it, on the days nobody was watching. Oman is betting the second kind still
22:16matters. As of late July 2026, with the wider U.S.-Iran conflict still simmering, and the Strait of
22:22Hormuz still contested, that bet remains entirely, precariously open. If you liked this, check out the
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